The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a COVID-19 assessment bot that can quickly assess the symptoms and risk factors for people worried about infection, provide information and suggest a next course of action such as contacting a medical provider or, for those who do not need in-person medical care, managing the illness safely at home.

Led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, vpnMentor’s research team of ethical hackers, recently discovered a data leak by the popular app Key Ring, that compromised the privacy and security of their 14 million users.

The number of new people claiming unemployment benefits totaled a staggering 6.648 million last week — doubling the record set a week earlier, the Department of Labor said recently. How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting the cybersecurity community and IT staffers?

Alan Katerinsky, cybersecurity expert and Professor of Management in Science and Systems at the University of Buffalo School of Management, provides cybersecurity tips for teleworkers during the coronavirus crisis.

New research from Infrascale indicates that 58 percent of C-level executives at small and medium businesses (SMBs) said their biggest data storage challenge is security vulnerability.

In spite of this cyber war and in an effort to be first to market, many companies still rush their products out while ignoring proper security integration during development which can lead to disastrous side effects for businesses. Costing them valuable data, reputation, money and time to amend their product weaknesses. Companies can spend a great deal of time and money developing security patches, repeatedly rolling back and implementing updates, and buying other technologies to secure their own offering. This cycle can potentially continue for years releasing cures to the latest aliments while fearing the next hit. 

Looking back at cybercrime incidents of the past 10 years, only the questions of "if" and "when" remain. "If" a business has no active cybersecurity policy and processes even just hundreds of rich customer records, "when" becomes soon enough. For the past 10 years, at least eight large-scale data breaches per year have trembled economies. You’d imagine that as business owners, we would have learned the immense value of the digital data we hold. The Ponemon Institute says that just in the US, the average size of a data breach is 25,575 records with a cost of $150 per record on average. That could be the money you would have paid in damages, as a government fine, and potentially in customer lawsuits.

How is the coronavirus pandemic shaping the business operations of criminal networks? Tracking how the market is changing in real time, Digital Shadows has observed that some operations have quickly curtailed their activity while the majority of malicious actors are capitalizing on the crisis, noting, for example, that an increase in online transactions has potentially bolstered success rates for credit and debit card fraud.